Geoffrey Lean is Britain's longest-serving environmental correspondent, having pioneered reporting on the subject almost 40 years ago.

Climate train pushes ahead, despite its skirmishing enemies

Reporting the increasingly bitter row over climate change these days is a bit like watching one of those old Westerns, where a wagon train is rattling through dangerous terrain, surrounded by skirmishing enemies, riddled with arrows, and yet still somehow making surprising progress towards its destination. The driver of one of the wagons, Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is haemorraging blood, having repeatedly shot himself in both feet. Passengers appear to be leaping off another, the bill before the US Senate. And the entire train almost went over a cliff in Copenhagen. Yet, rather than juddering to a halt, it just keeps on going, even picking up a little speed.

In just two months ninety-two countries have now signed up to the Copenhagen Accord – the deal patched together at the last minute by world leaders to avert the summit's total collapse – even though it has not even been adopted by the United Nations. Sixty-six of them (responsible for some 80 per cent of the world's emissions of carbon dioxide) have set out plans or targets for bringing the pollution under control. And, even since Copenhagen, many of the world's rapidly industrialising developing countries – those once thought least likely to take action – have introduced new measures: they include China, India, South Africa, Indonesia and Brazil.

Late last week Gordon Brown and the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi joined forces to chair a panel to work out how to fulfill one of the most ambitious, and controversial, provisions in the accord – raising a $100 billion a year fund by 2020 to help the poorest countries preserve their forests, develop through new low-carbon technologies, and adapt to the potentially devastating effects of global warming. The panel will work fast, reporting on its initial findings to an interim UN climate meeting in Bonn in June before making its final recommendations in November, when the world's governments convene in Cancun, Mexico, for the successor to Copenhagen.

Poor countries fear that it will plunder existing aid budgets, which would do grave damage to the fight against poverty. Brown says it must not do this, and the panel is examining innovative and relatively painless ways of raising the money.

One of the leading candidates is the Tobin Tax, a levy on banks' financial transactions – first suggested by the Nobel prizewinning economist, James Tobin, 38 years ago – as a way of curbing the most damaging speculation while raising money for the poor. Both France and Britain are backing the proposal – which could raise some $250 billion a year for spurring development, addressing climate change, and maybe even insuring against more bank failures – and it is increasingly gaining traction amid widespread disgust at the banks' continuing self-interest and short-termism.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the IMF – scarcely one of the world's softies – has put forwards another proposal; raising $100 billion a year by utilising its special drawing rights. And there are also plans from raising money from shipping and aviation, which at present escape the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol.

And so the wagon train rattles on towards Mexico – beset, as it is, by its enemies. Will it make it in one piece? Who knows. But it has already got further, faster, than anyone would have expected just a few weeks ago.